Monday, March 28, 2011

Until then

As soon as we've amassed 150 thousand troops in Tunisia, let me know. Then we can begin comparing Libya to Iraq. Until then............

Friday, March 25, 2011

Deficit? What Deficit?

I happened to see 10 minutes of CNN today (Bank line). They spent all sorts of time speculating on what effect turning over operations to NATO would have on the odds of the USA getting stuck in a long term conflict. Not one word was spent on odds of the USA getting stuck with the bill.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Reposted where I can find it

Interestingly Meltdown provided us with a perfect example of how Fox news cherrypicks research results to come to precisely the opposite conclusion as the study's authors.

Compare:

Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries. However, there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others. Fewer native-born African American Muslims than others completely condemn al Qaeda. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified. Nonetheless, absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world.


.
With:

The study found that among the nation's younger Muslims, 26 percent say homicide bombings can at least rarely be justified "in order to defend Islam from its enemies."

So a subset of a subset of the sample answered the question wrong.

Specifically:

Overall, 8% of Muslim Americans say
suicide bombings against civilian targets tactics
are often (1%) or sometimes (7%) justified in the
defense of Islam.

Troubling? Indeed.

A reason to attack Islam as a religion and spend hours in public forums explaining how evil it's practitioners are? Not so much.......